


Keeping the Stars Apart

by Blurble



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/M, Harm to Children, IN SPACE!, Immortals in Space, Note the following warnings:, Original Character(s), Outer Space, Suicide Attempt, Vampires, Vampires vs witches, What's the point in being an immortal vampire, Witch Curses, Witchcraft, Witches, and then it sort of turned into a story about family and making choices so., and violence as already tagged by archive warnings, if you don't get to visit SPACE, was basically the impetus for this story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-08 18:23:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11652129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blurble/pseuds/Blurble
Summary: Caroline leads a rescue mission and a war.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Emily for the lovely banner. 
> 
> Thank you to Xylophone for cheerleading, beta-ing, brainstorming, providing the title, and basically midwifing this fic into existence. 
> 
> Art of Adebayo is mine.

YS-127 was a mostly unremarkable small planet, in an unremarkable system that was fourteen days light travel from the nearest wormhole, which itself was an unremarkable, rarely trafficked byway that served as a hopstep in the more minor of two alternate routes to the main shipping paths between Alpha Eebra and Somaris.

It was the second planet in its solar system, and it had the mildly interesting feature of being tidally locked with its local star, a yellow dwarf with no special properties of interest. 

There was a small settlement located along the fertile band in the planet's "twilight zone", which circled the band between the planet's two halves, one perpetually night and the other forever drenched in sun. The settlement was the standard type you encounter on small, out of the way planets with sufficient resources to maintain a population but not enough to really achieve breakout success, small people focused on getting by in their day to day lives.

Which did nothing to explain the rigorous security procedures any ship approaching the planet was expected to undergo. 

The LuiseMeyer was a small, old, third-class freighter, docked at the planet's space elevator station. What should have been a routine, perfunctory inspection was taking, in the captain's opinion, far too long.

You'd think, Mako thought irritably, as the witch scanned their cargo hold for the third time, frowning at his instruments, that the planet's inhabitants would benefit from being a bit more lax with their smuggling regulations – it wasn't like anyone was interested in a tiny backwater off of all the major trading routes, and this unseemly obsessiveness certainly did nothing to encourage Mako to return for a visit a second time. 

"There's absolutely no lapis lazuli aboard this ship?" the witch asked, for the fifth time. He was wearing a spaceport security tag that said his name was “Adebayo Batefiori”, and before he'd gone to the trouble of opening his mouth and proving himself to be very, very annoying, Mako had briefly considered asking him if he was any relation to _the_ Batefiores, not because she expected the answer to be yes but because he was the kind of strikingly good-looking that made you want to at least attempt to flirt.

"There's the standard amount in the engine," Mako said, once again, not really trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice. "I certainly don't make a habit of hauling  around any more than that— do I look like someone who can afford discretionary sunrock?" 

The witch gave her a glance up and down—her clothes, in good repair but made of common cloth—and gave a slow, patronizing nod that made Mako bristle all down her spine. God, she hated witches. It was unfair beyond description that this particular one was so attractive.

"Will you be needing the charms seen to when you land?" the witch said, as if perfectly attuned to the topic most likely to remind Mako _why_ she hated witches. 

"No," Mako said, shortly. 

Of course the charms could use seeing to. She, however, couldn't afford it, so she'd make her slow way along the trade path until she found somewhere to buy the load of Iridium she'd picked up at better price than half. 

She couldn't remember why she'd decided to stop by this useless planet on the way, but thinking about it made her head ache, so she focused instead on her dislike of the witch. 

What was he so obsessed about with her hold? She herself was painfully aware there was nothing interesting there. Well yes, okay, there was the usual contraband and smuggled goods, which was part of why she was so eager to get him out of there. But he _hadn't_ spent time near the false panels hiding the compartments, and yet was still eyeing his scanner like it had personally offended him.

There _was_ the area by the— well, somewhere, Mako thought vaguely, and then lost track of the train of thought entirely.

“If you're quite done...” She said, giving him a glare.

"Yes, well," The witch said, at least having the decency to look a bit embarrassed.

Mako sighed, and began to leave the cargo hold, a broad hint for the witch to get going as well.

There was a- there was a woman in the shadows of the- there was-

A sudden flash of pain, a headache. She saw the witch with his hands up in the air, someone pressing a gun to his head. The smell of magic and counter-magic. A sparkle of blue on the woman's hands...

She slumped against the wall, fell to the floor.

 

Once upon a time the sun-facing portion of YS-127 had been a desert, filled with fine white sand blown by constant howling winds. But a few centuries previous a magical anomaly officially classed as “unknown” had melted all the sand to glass, a clear mirrored surface that reflected the sun's permanent, blinding rays back towards YS-127's permanently clear atmosphere. It was a horrible, inhospitable climate where nothing could live.

Two weeks journey by heavily cloaked antigravity craft would bring the intrepid or truly idiotic tourist to YS-127's sole tourist feature, a vast cave system hewn from a dull dark rock that was one of the hardest natural materials in the universe. There had been other rock types in the mountain range, but they'd all been worn away by centuries of howling sand, so all that was left of them was a gleaming blackness.

The tourist could step briefly into the first cave, look around, maybe shout to hear their voice swallowed in the echoless blackness, and then even the foolhardiest would head back. There was something about the caves, a sort of whispering silence, that made a visitor uneasy with fear.

Adebayo, for his part, was shaking like a leaf already. He stumbled forwards, his feet moving against his will, even as he begged and pleaded in his head for them to stop. There was dampness on his face, from tears he couldn't seem to stop. But the woman walking in front of Adebayo didn't seem to notice, and certainly didn't seem to care. She had not eased the vise-like grip on his mind since she'd grabbed hold of him on the cargo ship.

There were things— he'd learned once, ages ago, in some dim dusty memory of primary school, methods of throwing off mental control. Only he couldn't— he couldn't think, he was so terrified. It was so hard just to breathe, desperate rasping gulps around the panic filling his disobedient body.

In the suffocating darkness they came to the sheer cliff Adebayo wasn't supposed to know was there. 

A small whimper of terror escaped him.

The woman didn't stop walking, and Adebayo didn't stop following. Did the woman not see, not know it was there? Walking confidently to their deaths? Nothing made sense, and he held back a scream as he felt his feet lose purchase against solid ground.

And yet they didn't plummet to their deaths. Instead Adebayo recognized the slow, dreamlike feeling of their descent as that provided by an antigravity device. This did not reassure him. The terror in his mind was growing, building into a shrieking wail.

He knew what the woman was. He didn't want to know, his mind had fought furiously to hide the knowledge from him.

There weren't supposed to be any left, they were supposed to have been eliminated centuries ago.

And yet as they descended further in the total, utter darkness he was forced to admit it to himself.

There was a Free Vampire, and she was leading him to the worst possible place a Free Vampire could go.

 

 

When the witch had boarded the ship for inspection, Caroline had scanned his mind as a standard precautionary measure, nothing more. By now it had become practically rote, millennia of conscientiously refraining from over-indulging in those powers cast aside in the name of necessity.

So she’d been completely unprepared for what she found there, temporarily shocked into inaction before realizing, original plan be damned, she _had_ to take advantage of the golden opportunity that had walked into their grasp.

Knowledge of YS-127’s dark secret was, for obvious reasons, diligently guarded by a small and powerful inner circle. The original plan had involved the possibility of weeks if not months of careful infiltration just to get a chance at striking at one of the heavily guarded select few. And instead this witch- low ranking enough to be inspecting a _ship_ \- had apparently, once, against entire books of protocol, been used as an emergency backup for a casting here.

It was so impossibly lucky Caroline was convinced it was a trap. But she’d sprung into action anyway, sending Matt and Yasmin and Adah and the mind-whammed pilot on a rush mission to secure an exit plan. Matt, at least, had been absurdly excited by the sudden upheaval of everything, which was very typical. She hoped Yasmin could manage to keep him in check.

She had some backup for her end of things here, but she tried not to let herself think of them right now. She didn’t want to be relying on them mentally as a crutch. As it was she was vividly aware that they had only one shot at this, with security measures so seemingly lax, the witches lulled into a false complacency. If they failed now it might be centuries, or never, before they could try again. If they even managed to successfully get away, which she still found hard to believe.

The knowledge of the route she was plucking from the man’s head was genuine, at least. Unless the witches had discovered a method of implanting false memories so convincingly a seasoned vampire couldn’t tell. Useless speculation, she needed to get a grip on himself. She was too used to running four plans through her mind at all times. Focus, Caroline.

The man himself was genuinely terrified. That much couldn’t be faked, it rose off him in great, stinking waves. So much so that Caroline almost felt a flickering of pity.

She reminded herself of Asdar, and the boy. Even the ship she had stowed away on to get here, the same as every ship— what was one witch in the scale of such things?

No, the time for pity was long past. She tightened her grip on his mind almost viciously, choking off the keening whimpers he’d started to emit. They proceeded onwards in the dark.

 

When Senior Albran had forced Adebayo into joining the casting, he’d warned Adebayo to keep his eyes down the entire time, not to look, not to ask questions, and to forget anything he saw. Adebayo had done his best to comply.

He’d done his best, but clearly it hadn’t been enough. And now he was here again, in this hellish cave, glowing ominously reddish-green through a haze of spells, hexes, curses, and blood-charms.

It was less a cave than a cavern, really, echoing and vast, tens of stories high. And there in the center, floating thousands of meters up in the air, was The Vampire.

The vampress laid her hand on Adebayo’s neck and the guthook feeling of an antigrav kicking in started up again. There was something almost ludicrous about their gentle, slow rise in the air, coupled with Adebayo’s racing heart. He was on the verge of passing out, he would have passed out already but the force in his mind was forcing him to remain conscious, was forcing his eyes to remain open, so he couldn’t look away, as they came close enough to see the creature suspended in the air.

He looked like a monster, his face shriveled so his fangs were exposed, his head at an impossible angle as the spell around his neck cracked it once again. He was unconscious, under a sleep spell, and in a stasis wrap but Adebayo could still _feel_ the malignance coming off him. A spelled chain had been threaded through his gut before being wrapped around him and the floating stake, and even as they watched the creature’s flesh tried to knit itself over the open wound and burned away, blackening. The smell was unspeakable horrible, and Adebayo’s stomach lurched. And then he was throwing up, so high in the air he couldn’t hear a sound from the impact of his vomit on the floor.

The Vampress waited until he was done, heaving nothing but bile.

“Get him off this, witch,” she said.

"I don't—it's too powerful an enchantment for me to—"

She pressed into his mind, overwhelming him.

He felt himself nod, his body a robot whose motion he could only observe from a distance, as he pulled power from himself, from the air, from the very blood charms, and fed it into the chains so that they splintered under his hand. He could feel centuries of curses breaking, rebounding—

For a moment the grip on his mind lifted. He turned, channeling the energy flowing through him towards the vampress, but it was too late, the chains on The Vampire falling away, the air around them boiling as an alarm shrieked. There was a massive boom, and he was falling, they were all falling—

He saw the vampress floating, farther away as he fell. She was glowing blue with a halo of protective spells. He felt a horrible regret that she was going to get away, and only afterwards that he was definitely going to die.

He was losing consciousness rapidly, thoughts blurring together, making no sense— she was near, somehow, suddenly, and— cursing? It felt like he was being yanked upwards, which wasn’t how he’d always expected dying to feel. He hoped it meant something good, like that he was going to heaven. The world went black.

 

 

Khaleed was waiting with Soyala, who was keeping an eye on the cave entrance while Khaleed had a nice long chat with the ground. It was good ground, very good, definitely didn’t deserve to have been melted into glass, that was terrible. Khaleed would definitely be happy to loosen it up, absolutely. He was beginning to get a good rhythm going, like running scratches down someone’s back, the ground purring underneath him.

And then half the cliff side exploded.

Khaleed had just enough time to think “Oh boy, this is it—”

And then there was a WHUMP and Caroline landed in the freaking backseat, from what must have been three stories up, carrying _two_ people in her arms, and she was screaming "Fly! Fly! Fly!"

"How did you even manage to aim yourself to land exactly in position?" Khaleed asked, which was stupid, because when was there ever a point questioning how Caroline managed anything. She bent spacetime around her from sheer stubbornness, that woman.

"Doesn't matter fly fly fly!" Caroline said, looking like 70% more crazy than usual, all bloody and disheveled and wind-whipped.

Khaleed flew.

There were witches coming after them and apparitions and a giant heaving sand monster that must have been, like, laid down as a booby trap god knows when. But Soyala had brought a machine gun rocket launcher and was firing away with her usual terrifying accuracy, and the ground was grateful for the assistance earlier and therefore perfectly happy to listen to Khaleed’s slightly strange request and form, suddenly, a giant wall of sand bursting from the shifting glass.

It had been a long, long time since Khaleed had been able to be planet-side and it felt good down to his bones, a feeling he knew he’d be missing desperately soon.

But he focused on the flying, even as the in the background he maintained a steady meditation on slabs of rock remembering what it feels like to be magma spurting into the air, on ground crackling into open air, that felt good, didn’t it...

“Why do you have the _witch_?” Soyala shrieked, as she caught glimpse of the backseat while twisting around to blow a pair of witches out of the air.

“I couldn’t leave him there,” Caroline said, “there was an entire mountain about to fall on him!”

“Good!” Soyala said, “let it! What the hell are we suppose to do with him now?”

“I’ll figure something out on the ship,” Caroline said.

Khaleed risked a quick glance back. "He really doesn't look good," he said. “We could probably dump him over the side…”

“Just fly to the spaceport, Khaleed,” Caroline said, in her bossy voice.

“What, like, straight in?” Khaleed said, not managing to keep the incredulity out of his voice. The port is absolutely _swarming_ with witches.

“Yasmin’s supposed to have taken care of it,” Caroline said, "Just smash open the spaceport gate.

"I'm yet more convinced you're not sane, right now," Khaleed said, and Caroline gave him a fierce grin, all teeth.

He pressed down hard on the accelerator bar, both feet, and the ship streaked forward.

When the sirens went off all along the entire Kepler belt Diola Batefiore's initial reaction was annoyance. What _now_.

They'd been having a string of false alarms for two years now, it was ridiculous. Two perpetrators had been caught, one a teen involved with some net group— enough maybe to raise a red flag— but the other was just a copycat, and that was probably the rest of them, too...

Except the alarms kept going, for two hours, giving everyone in the station a headache, and when Diola tried to call her brother no one answered the commline.

And then the news started to carry, first through secured channels, and then through unsecured ones, also.

Something had happened on YS-127. Something— no details given, which meant for 85% of the witches it was vaguely interesting, for 14.5% of witches it was somewhat concerning, and for the remaining half percent of witches it was the most terrifying news they’d faced in their tenure.

Diola was unquestionably one of the half percent.

For the hundredth time she dialed Adebayo's personal number, and his office number, and his secure number.

No answer, no answer, no answer.

His life charm on her bracelet was still glowing vigorously. He wasn’t dead. Where _was_ he?


	2. Chapter 2

The next thing Mako remembered, she was sitting in a command chair fancier than any pilot’s seat she’d been in touching distance of in her life. She didn’t know how she got there, but the most likely explanation was that she was dreaming. This was made more likely by the voice in her head, telling her to calculate wormgate coordinates. Mako had always been able to do this in her head, but she’d never actually been in a ship with the capability to really test it out. Since this was a dream, though, it didn’t seem to matter. She moved her hands through the controls.

Underneath her the dreamship shuddered, utterly convincing. Mako rarely had dreams this vivid, and was kind of hoping this one lasted for a while. She could even smell the fancy smell of the ship, like rich people and opulence and a little bit of burnt marshmallows.

And then there was nothing, sudden and shocking, and she knew she wasn’t dreaming.

 

In nullspace there is nothing.

No sight.

No sound.

No touch.

Total, perfect sensory deprivation. It's like you don't even exist.

You could go mad here, easily.

You could lose your soul.

If you have one to lose.

When they blinked out of nullspace Caroline was curled up on the floor trying to hold herself together and failing, and Klaus's eyes were open.

"Darling," he said, and it made her come out of the rocking fetal-position curl the cold of nullspace had left her in, made her crawl towards him, desperate to touch his face and know that it was real.

Then his eyes shuttered closed again and he was gone again.

Caroline wanted to stay with him, wanted to hold him until he was fixed.

But she couldn’t. The Hele Masn had been the best available null-capable ship in the space port— Caroline was very impressed Matt and co had managed to commandeer her— and a such she was littered with tracking and insurance spells. Their hop from the spaceport had been to a disposable location, chosen at random from a map. But they didn’t have enough jasper or agate to go hopping around forever, and it was vitally important that they make it to the next destination untracked.

So she left Klaus, promising herself it wouldn’t be like last time, hating herself more than a little.

She passed the ritual room, where Yasmin was kneeling, eyes closed, mouth tense. Khaleed caught up with her in the hallway.

"Five in the cargo hold," Khaleed said. "Two in the pilot's room, thus far."

"Tell me how I can help," Caroline said.

"Most of them can be destroyed with fire or cursed water or void. I'll keep looking, you work on these," and he gestured to a small pile of amulets, charms, and other spelled goods. "I'm not going to bother checking them for tracking specifically, just assume they have and destroy them all."

Caroline nodded and got to work. The sooner they finished, the sooner the two witches on board could focus on trying to disentangle Klaus from as many spells as possible.

In the meantime…

“The witch needs to be restrained, before he wakes up,” she said. “And Klaus needs blood, desperately.”

Khaleed nodded, understanding her intent. “We need to question him,” he said.

“I trust you to handle it,” Caroline said, and walked over to the pile of spells, cracking her hands in readiness to get to work.

 

 

 

 

When they came out of nullspace Mako’s hands had moved automatically, guiding the ship into a stable resting maneuver, calm, cool as a cookie, 100% in control, totally on top of things.

Then, as soon as autopilot was engaged, she’d risen jerkily from the oh-god-oh-god-so-expensive command seat and walked, robot-like, to the captain lounge and bathroom.

And now Mako was sitting on a toilet seat that was, honest to Ava, more comfortable and expensive than any pilot’s command seat she’d ever sat in before, excluding the ludicrous, unbelievable one she’d just evacuated, which was probably made from silkfur and hand-collected fluff off baby bottoms, and which she’d just _flown through nullspace._

There were so many ways it could have gone wrong, and yet it hadn’t, hence how she was now sitting in a captain lounge so filthy rich and pretentious it had fake-gravity toilets just for the mere honor of collecting swanky piss.

She was trying to remember how to breathe, but it all seemed suddenly impossible.

When the panic attack was over, she rose on shaky feet and headed back to the control room. She needed to know what was going on, and she wasn’t going to find answers kneeling over a toilet.

When she got there, someone else was also in the room. Maybe she’d been there all along, actually, it wasn’t like Mako had noticed on her mad dash out. She was a tiny little woman with short, bright blue hair, and she was holding two large mugs, with steam coming off them.

“I’m Adah,” she said, proffering a mug instead of a hand. “Ship mechanic, but this one’s all ship-shape, so I’m here to explain to you what the hell is going on instead.”

“Oh, thank _God_ ,” Mako said.

She was feeling a little bit less grateful by the time the explanation was over, what with the whole being gangpressed into a revolutionary army she’d had no idea existed. Adah had apologized when she’d explained that they couldn’t let Mako go anytime soon, but that didn’t really count for very much, you know, with the whole _mental coercion_ and _vampires_ and _declaring war on the entire freaking witch council._

On the other hand, Mako had spent her entire life this far chasing a dream of the kind of pilot she wanted to be and never really coming any closer to it, ever, just scraping by. So she could, what, consent to having herself mind-controlled again so that if they got put on trial she’d probably not be executed? Or she could negotiate.

“I want this ship,” she said.

“Honestly, you pilot her better than most anyone I’ve seen,” Adah said. “It’s a deal.”

They grinned at each other, Mako’s grin maybe a bit on the watery side, but it was a start.

 

Adebayo regained consciousness slowly and unwillingly.

His hands were chained behind him and he recognized the humming numb weirdness that meant the shackles must contain anti-magic wards.

His arm was bruised. He saw multiple marks of a syringe.

"So I'm the blood bag," he murmured to himself, and then jerked in his bonds from surprise when someone snickered. Heart racing, he searched around the room, eyes straining—

There was a man sitting at a table in the corner of the room. For a moment Adebayo thought it was the— the vam— the person they got from the cave.

But then the man stood up and walked closer, and Adebayo saw that it wasn't. They looked nothing alike— the one in the cave was pale, not just skin but overall coloring including blond hair, and this man was darker, deep brown hair and olive skin.

And he was not a vampire, Adebayo noticed, and then, in a sudden burst of hope and shock, he realized the man was a witch.

"How did you get here?" he whispered, and then thought better of the question. "Forget it, there's no time, we need to move, they could find us any minute now."

"Sure, sure," the man said. He didn't seem nervous at all, bizarrely calm on a ship terra-knew-where with at least a minimum of two Free Vampires on it. "But I have to know what's in it for me?"

Adebayo stared at him, unable to hide his disgust. So this was how it was going to be, then.

"My sister— she can definitely pay a reward. You just— what do you want?" he said.

"I don't believe you," the man said casually. He started to walk away, and Adebayo swallowed, but— he's not going to survive, not here, this is his last chance—

"She's close to the high council!" he said. This is, technically speaking, true.

The man turned around, slowly.

"Really now," he said. His eyes were flat, cold, all pretense of friendliness gone. "I never would have guessed. Adebayo Batefiore, is it?"

Adebayo closed his eyes, trying to remember the suicide spell. But he— can't—

"The magic wards are a precaution," the man said, conversationally. "But we've been siphoning your magic as well, just in case."

"Siphoning?" Adebayo whispered. Would horrors never cease. How many abominations were there on this ship?

He realized he'd spoken aloud when the man slapped him, hard across his face. He tasted blood from where he bit his tongue.

"Thank for the confirmation of your identity, _Batefiore_ ,” the man spits. “I'd take a good, long look in the mirror and ask myself who the real abomination is here," he added, then turned on his heel and walked away.

 

 

Yasmin was so busy running maintenance to fix the nullspace damage to the wards that she missed Khaleed's approach until he actually entered the room, at which point she turned to tell him to leave her alone to concentrate and stopped, at the expression on his face.

"Okay," she said, instead, and hugged him, for several long moments. He didn’t, as a general rule, like hugs, but he let her, just this once.

He pulled away, finally. "Need to keep this ship together," he said, and went over to the first warding circle, running his fingers lightly over the etchings. There was a circle of candles and another circle of incense sticks, suspended in zero-gravity, as well as two enormous, almost fist-sized chunks of lapis-lazuli. It was the best-equipped casting room Yasmin has had access to in a while, and she feels almost dizzy with power. Khaleed, far removed from his element, was not nearly as comfortable, and Yasmin wished they’d been able to haul some dirt aboard before takeoff, but other needs had taken precedence.

"We need to go fix the— Klaus," she said, instead. "It's upsetting Caroline. We need to figure out how to undo that curse, and we need to get the ship fixed up proper before we can do that."

"Okay," he said, and breathed in deeply a few times, centering himself, and then they got back to work, side by side, Yasmin doing magic and Khaleed spotting her, like they had since— as long as she could remember, really.

That Yasmin needed to hide who she was, she knew from before she could remember knowing anything. She didn't know how she knew, only that it was a secret she needed to keep more urgently than she needed to stay close to Umi, always, in the market.

The first time she siphoned must have been in the crib, from Khaleed. Presumably if she'd done it to an adult that early that would have been the end of it, her secret burst open. Most siphoner babies were killed in their first month of life.

But it took her mother until she was three years old to realize, and by then she wasn't able to give her daughter up to the police, and so they kept it a secret and Yasmin naively believed that secret could last forever.

She promised that she would stop— but she kept taking, from Khaleed. He let her, and she hid it from her parents, because she knew they would say no, and they didn't understand, that in school you needed magic, little charms and wishes, just to be able to fit in and play the playground games.

And she was careful, she pretended to be earth-magic just like Khaleed was, he taught her how, it was their little secret in the larger secret their family carried together in terror, and she realized her mistake only when the magic testers came, when she was eight. Earth magic was less than useless in the space corps so Khaleed was passed over, but apparently a teacher had said something to someone about— how she'd shown— aptitude in more than one kind of magic—

And after that it was two years of running away, and both her parents dying in front of her, and then being rescued, suddenly, by someone who looked like she was seventeen years old—.

But was much, much older.

"I've been looking for someone like you for a long, long time," Caroline said, and Yasmin had shrunk away in fear. But it was impossible to be afraid of Caroline, it turned out. She showed Yasmin how to paint her toenails and how to style her hair. She was really good at smiling.

She introduced Khaleed to Sam and Otto, and Khaleed got to learn how to ride fast cars and shoot big guns and no one called him a hedgewitch.

And all along Yasmin knew, that some day she'd be asked to repay all of it.

 

 

When they’d done the best they could to clean the ship of trackers, there were many things clamoring for attention, but it was irrelevant, because Caroline couldn’t handle anything else until Klaus was dealt with.

They all sat together, let Yasmin siphon power in small quantities from each of them until it glowed around her like a halo

The shards of wood couldn’t be destroyed, but Yasmin managed to relocate them, with a small piece of Klaus's flesh, into a magically isolated jar. Klaus's stomach sealed shut.

He coughed blood, then vomited— red like blood but... chunkier.

"Thank you," he rasped, and closed his eyes, resting his head against the cool floor.

Caroline slumped, the tension gone out of her like a snapped bow. The others headed out of the room quickly, to deal with the thousand now yet more urgent things to handle, but Khaleed lingered, and therefore Yasmin lingered as well.

Caroline was so absorbed in her own thoughts she didn’t seem to notice they had stayed.

Yasmin cleared her throat.

“Yasmin, Khaleed, how can I help you?” Caroline said.

“The witch you rescued,” Khaleed said. “Were you aware of who he was?”

“He said his name was Adebayo…” Caroline said.

“Adebayo Batefiore, yes,” Khaleed said.

Caroline’s eyes widened. “Batefiore, as in…?”

“Diola Batefiore, yes,” Khaleed said. “He’s in magic suppressing cuffs and I stripped him of every charm I could find, but I guarantee you, he has protection tattoos we can’t remove unless we skin him, and he almost certainly can unleash a death curse.”

“We could space him?” Yasmin suggested, tentatively.

“And end up with the ship exploding? Don’t think we could avoid that unless we did a nullspace jump. Wouldn’t want to risk that even then.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Caroline said, biting her lip.

The twins left the room, and she turned back to Klaus, found his eyes open.

“There’s a _Batefiore_ on this ship?” he spat.

She flinched.

“Caroline, what did you _do?_ _”_

“He was going to be buried under a pile of rubble,” she said, unable to keep the defensiveness out of her voice.

“So? There’s a lot worse fates. I would know.” Klaus said.

“I couldn’t just— I didn’t realize he was a Batefiore, he could have been innocent, I couldn’t just—”

“None of them are innocent! How have you not learned this in the past centuries! There is a time and place for your, your bleeding-heart nonsense—”

She removed his head from her lap as gently as she could manage. “I’m not having this conversation with you right now,” she said, voice shaking. “You need to recover. We can rehash this fight when you can walk on your own.”

“Fine,” he gritted out, “but I’m holding you to that. Now stop trying to leave, come back here.”

She wiped away a tear and did so, settling next to him.


	3. Chapter 3

Adebayo dreamed.  
He dreamed his sister was looking for him, in a vast dark hallway full of stars. He could hear her calling to him, as he tried to will his feet to move, and for a panicked moment it was like he was held in place, a prisoner in his own body, something horribly familiar about the sensation.  
But then the feeling passed and he found that he was walking smoothly, almost gliding, and his sister’s voice was near.. Nearer..   
He turned a corner and she was there.  
“Adebayo!” she said. “Where are you!?”  
Confused, he gestured down to himself, to his feet standing against an inky blackness.  
“Not here, in the waking world,” she said.  
“I think… I think I’m on a ship,” he said, slowly, as he tried to parse the question. He felt peaceful and happy, safe with his sister nearby.  
“Is there anyone else on the ship with you?” she pressed.  
The questions made something in him uneasy, his stomach lurching. He didn’t want to leave this place, wanted to stay here, wanted to follow his sister who seemed to hover just out of reach even as he tried to move closer to her.  
“There’s… I remember there was a witch… He was… He didn’t want to help me,” Adebayo said.   
“What did he look like?” Diola asked, but Adebayo was remembering more now, reluctantly, feeling each memory tearing away the warmth and safety he’d been enjoying.  
“There was a woman— she was blond— young— no— no, she was— she was a vampire!” He said, panic racing through him suddenly. “Diola, there’s a free vampire, she entered my mind, I didn’t know how to stop her!”  
Diola’s eyes widened. “A blond vampress? It can’t be…” She looked down at her hands, made some sort of gesture Adebayo didn’t recognize. Then she looked back up, grabbed Adebayo’s hand.   
“Listen to me,” she said. “This vampress, we’ve been looking for her for a long time. You need to stay alert, pay attention.”  
“I want to be rescued,” Adebayo said, plaintively. Already he could feel the dream slipping away, and as it did there was a terrified feeling of abandonment growing in his chest.   
“We will. I will,” Diola promised. “Be brave, brother.”

On Caroline’s three thousandth birthday Klaus bought her a three-story cake covered in tiny LED lights.  
“I’m not going to count these to confirm there’s three thousand of them,” Caroline said, rolling her eyes and secretly melting inside like she always did at Klaus’s ridiculous stunts. She looked from the cake to Klaus, and found that he was kneeling, a box in his hands.  
“Uh…” She said.  
“Caroline Elizabeth Forbes,” Klaus intoned. “You are officially half my age plus seven years. This means a relationship between us is no longer ‘creepy’”— at this he actually made air quotes with his fingers. “So I’m asking you again, please marry me.”  
“Klaus,” Caroline said, helplessly. “The reason a relationship between us is a bad idea isn’t because you’re almost three thousand years older than me, it’s because you’re kind of occasionally a crazy psychotic evil bastard and we disagree about almost everything and have never managed to date for longer than two weeks without one of us breaking furniture.”  
“I like breaking furniture with you,” Klaus said, eyes wide in faux-earnestness that, with Klaus, was simply a cover for real earnestness. “Your furniture breaking is sexy. I’d happily break furniture for you, with you, or at you, for all eternity.”  
Caroline knelt next to him, taking his face in her hands.  
“This is a horrible and stupid mistake that I know I will regret,” she said. “My bet is we last a month before you file for a divorce.”  
“I’ll take that bet,” Klaus said. “Wedding is this afternoon at 3pm, I’ve booked a hall and ordered the dress, don’t bother with makeup you’re gorgeous as you are darling.”  
“Wait— what— Klaus!” Caroline said, but he pressed a kiss to her forehead and was leaving, ignoring her protestations, as always.  
They got married.  
12 hours later, the witches bombed Kalastra and the war began in earnest.

Because there wasn’t a better solution, they kept Adebayo in the cuffs and had Khaleed and Soyala switch off watching him. Soyala didn’t have magic, but she was the only other crew member who could be spared. Everyone else was busy preparing, for the nulljump that would take them to one of the rebel bases. Caroline was on secure commlines practically round the clock, coordinating efforts around the universe. Klaus was recovering, and had managed to walk an entire circuit around his room by the time the day of the jump came.  
They brought Adebayo in with them, because they wanted all crew available and ready. He was less of a risk with multiple eyes on him, anyway. His initial defiance had faded into a deeply suspicious compliance, but they hadn’t been able to identify any tricks he might have up his sleeve to explain the change.   
Caroline’s latest plan for what to do with him was save him as a bargaining chip. No one, including Caroline, thought this would actually work, but it was the best idea they had at the moment.  
As she did before every null jump, or at least tried to if she had the chance, Caroline approached the fuel tank, tried to project positive energy.  
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. It was useless, a meaningless gesture that didn’t accomplish anything, except to remind her what they were fighting for. What was meaningful was the fight itself, the long-term plan. She would change things, she had to.  
The jump through nullspace was as brief and eternal as always. Caroline hated how she fell apart each time. The trauma had faded over time— she was functioning now, wasn’t she? But she didn’t think it would ever leave, the loss of self, the time passing forever and never at all, the cold that wasn’t physical. She and Klaus had agreed in a kind of wordless compact never to discuss the separate tortures they’d undergone when they’d been separated.  
There wasn’t time to curl up on the floor and weep, there never was. Once they had appeared over the planet, it was time to open the sails and prepare for descent.

K89I2 was a dark planet, seemingly untouched by civilization. Three wormholes away from the nearest official civilization, a small, pathetic trading outpost along the outermost arm of the Xerii galaxy, it had polar ice-caps but the rest of the planet was bone-dry. A medium-good candidate for terraforming, if it had been located near anything useful, which it wasn't. It was one of billions of planets. There was nothing special about it, except that underneath the dry surface was a rebel base.

Long-ago volcanic activity had left the surface of the planet riddled in caverns upon subterranean caverns. Water melted from the polar caps and piped into the cave system formed underground gardens. In dark caverns bereft of light there were sheets of edible lichen, which formed the main portion of the vegetable content of the local diet, but there were some brighter caverns where some hardy fruit and vegetables were grown. 

The main meat was the Cgasda Burrow Mole, an imported species. There was nothing to be done to improve it's flavor, other than drowning it out completely, which was why so much of the precious sunlit spaces were spent on growing fireroot. 

The Hele Masn blinked into existence 8 light-hours away from the planet, and then sailed in slowly on solar sails. K89I2 had Sequence-6 K-spectrum subdwarf star, not the frequency the sails were optimized for, but good enough.

The space port was hidden within the caldera of a very long dead volcano, camouflaged in the permanent shadows cast by its right side. 

Mako pulled off the landing without a hitch, and then the crew disembarked, everyone springing into action hugging friends and shouting greetins. Caroline was already back on the comms, issuing orders to seemingly dozens of people. 

 

In the lull, for a brief moment, no one seemed to be paying attention to Adebayo. He’d been under constant surveillance the entirety of his capture, his only escape in his dreams, occasionally visited by his sister, to whom he reported everything. He knew that his captors were keeping him alive only out of concern for the damage his death spells could cause, and he wasn’t naive— there were ways to circumvent death spells, and his enemies would figure one out eventually. He was determined to go out on his own terms, somehow. If an opportunity came, free of surveillance. If he could somehow acquire a weapon.  
Until then, he reported to his sister. She was continually reassuring him that the information he provided was helpful, but he could recognize her disappointment even in a dream, knew there was little he had to offer. He pretended to believe her, anyway.

Diola was the ambitious one, following in their father and their aunt’s footsteps, rising in the ranks of power, amassing secrets upon secrets. What Adebayo had wanted was a quiet life, keeping his head down, not getting caught up in the furor that was his family. And it hadn’t always been successful— it couldn’t be, when you were a Batefiore— but mostly he’d managed, stayed in lower-level positions, kept a quiet life.  
And now all this had happened, and Adebayo knew all he could really hope for at this point was that his death not be a total waste.

Even with everything they did to plan in advance, even with as much cutting of corners as they could safely, or unsafely but reasonably, or unreasonably but not totally insanely afford. Even then it took over a month before the rebels— the wing of the rebels assigned to this project, because Caroline was not betting the entire movement on the success of this mission— were ready to take off.  
Klaus spent that time recovering. Khaleed was able to give him a bit more attention, trying to undo some of the curse damage. He insisted on starting regular sparring sessions with Caroline, even though she could tell he was operating on something like 10% of his full strength.  
Mako made friends. Mako made a lot of friends. For the first time in her life she wasn't scrabbling for respect and scraps. Everyone was very, very impressed that she'd been the pilot for the mission and even though she herself tried to be honest about how small and replaceable her role was, by the end of the month the legend surrounding the story had her as the greatest space pilot since Bao Zhang herself. It was pretty easy to forget that it was all part of the craziest, most suicidal resistance mission to ever exist.  
She expected to be left behind but Caroline had apparently insisted that she be one of the pilots. She said Mako had a brain that was "easy to work with". Mako tried hard not to be incredibly creeped out by this.  
She spent time with the witch, too. Adebayo. Or rather, he spent time with her. After the first few days there he'd tracked her down. He was uncomfortable with the rebels and he seemed to consider her to be as separate from them as he was, and although that had become increasingly untrue she'd hidden that from him because— because he seemed lonely and she felt bad for him, and she recognized that if he recognized her shifting sympathies she'd be immediately classed as "the enemy" and he would refuse to speak with anyone at all.  
If she was surprised that Caroline has insisted Mako come along, she was shocked that Caroline insisted Adebayo was coming too.


	4. Chapter 4

Yamnaim was an oceanic planet with a highly active crust, the constant volcanic activity creating and dissolving the small islands that dotted the planet's surface. Limestone deposits hardened into marble pillars extending upwards where the seafloor was shallow.

The ocean's of Yamnaim were the deepest, purest blue, the kind of blue the human eye could stare at mesmerized for hours, watching the gentle variations in color caused by the waves on the water's surface.

And on the islands of Yamnaim there was sun-rock. Lapis lazuli, as it was called in the old language. That it was a protection for vampires was mostly a legend, by now, but everyone knew it was important for travel between the stars.

Naturally, therefore, Yamnaim was also a military base. The smooth surface of the water was an illusion, for barely two hundred meters below the first battle ships were anchored to the pillars, and they extended in great chains of them, hundreds and hundreds.

Mako thought it was insane that their first mission after rescuing Klaus was trying to conquer an entire planet, but everyone kept telling her to trust that Caroline knew what she was doing. There was, presumably, some trick.

The trick, it turned out, was two fold. The first was that Klaus turned almost 200 human soldiers stationed on the planet, into werewolves. Because, apparently, that was a thing. How he managed to sneak into the watery ships and out undetected, nobody knew, but Caroline, when asked, said that after a few thousand years you started to pick up some tricks. The soldiers were very angry about it. Very, very angry. Ships started exploding.

But that alone wouldn't have been enough, except that, right when the battle was at it's most pitched, giant tentacles had sprouted out of the water and begun spearing ships.

Apparently Yamnaim had a sentient squid population. Giant squids. Very, very giant. They'd also apparently started to get annoyed at the human presence on the planet. How Caroline had found this out, how she'd managed to communicate with them, and how she'd secured an alliance were all a story Yasmin was desperate to hear, some day. But the planet had been won, and the war, officially, had begun (well, restarted, according to Caroline).

 

 

The way Caroline sold it to Klaus was as a public relations stunt. They needed that, needed more than just a small string of victories if they wanted to win this for real, in the long run. It didn’t matter how surprised and unprepared the witches were, at the careful and very secret planning Caroline had done the past centuries, they would only be off-balance very briefly. After that, there wasn’t a chance, not with the witches vastly outnumbering and outpowering them.

So they needed the public relations, needed to convince people, and it was a good point, really, that the visuals of it would be more impressive. Klaus was convinced— reluctantly, after a few hours screaming about risks and Caroline’s soft heart while Caroline tried her best to look innocent, what soft heart, she was being pragmatic here, and the others had come around to her side long before, so that it was mostly a symbolic point by the time Klaus slumped in his chair and said “Fine, whatever, have it your way, it’s not like you’ll change your mind.”

But he’d been write all along, because the PR was an excuse. Klaus had the knack for taking people’s minds and not absorbing anything from them, but Caroline didn’t, and she felt responsible for — but no, that wasn’t it either, that was just lying to herself, making excuses.

Caroline knew Adebayo was everything they were fighting against, the callousness, the disregard, the freaking _Batefiores_ , but she wanted—

A thousand seven hundred and twenty years ago she’d been good friends with an Ademurewa Batefiore, very long since deceased. It wasn’t— significant. A totally different Batefiore family, no relation, probably, not that she’d kept track. That wasn’t the—

Before the war Caroline had had friends who were witches. Acquaintances who were witches. A long, long time ago she’d had—

It was easy for Klaus to hate, and she envied him for it sometimes, the pure simplicity of it. She’d never managed. She’d never manged to hate Klaus, even though heaven knew he’d deserved it so many times, and she thought she’d managed to hate the witches, after all they’d done.

But here she was again, wanting to believe.

 

The entire space flight to Yamnaim Adebayo didn’t know where they were going. He was still in anti-magic cuffs and under constant guard, and he didn’t know what they were planning, where they were bringing him now. Mostly he’d expected to be stranded on a desolate planet so he could die of starvation after a while, far enough away the death curse would barely have an effect. But there were too many other people on the ship for that theory to make sense, unless they would maybe strand him as a stopover on the way to somewhere else?

He was left on the ship during the attack, but his guards wanted to see the action so they brought him to the telecast room, and he got to see it also, cannons firing, spells exploding, nightmarish tentacles, the whole deal. The ship was in low orbit and providing firing support, and there were two near misses where the ship, and Adebayo, were almost blown into oblivion.

But then the fight was over, everything gone weirdly calm after the pitched chaos. And then he was really terrified, because he was suddenly sure they didn’t mean to strand him at all, and that meant it must be something worse they had in mind.

And then the vampress called and asked for his guards to bring him to the engine room of the ship. She’d shuttled back from the planet, apparently leaving other people in charge of the clean-up down below. Adebayo was shaking enough his knees were knocking together, and in his head he was furiously berating himself, be brave, dammit, be less of a total embarrassment.

The engine room was crammed full of recording and broadcast equipment. There were three huge terminals running, bits of dialogue exchanged back and forth that Adebayo vaguely understood as being about hacking into newsfeeds, or something.

Someone placed a placard around his neck, with “Adebayo Batefiore” written on it in Basic. The vampress turned him around with her hands, until she was satisfied he was in position properly, caught in the frame, standing close next to the engine, his face lit weirdly by the glowing green light from the giant cylinder.

He still didn’t really understand, even as he looked into the cameras, felt woozy with fear.

“Start recording… Now,” Caroline said, and as a green light started flashing she picked up a crowbar and, without hesitating, smashed the tank.

"Wait, don’t—" He cried out, and flinched back from an explosion, like he’d been taught about. But the explosion never came.

The blue-black fluid that filled the tank formed a viscous, spreading puddle on the floor. Tied to the pole in the center of where the tank had been was half a gir— a — vamp— a child.

She was physically around nine years old, and whoever had chopped her in half hadn't bothered to do a neat job of it, rough hacked off edges of meat and splintered bone along the line from scalp to waist, the arm and leg dangling absurdly whole in comparison. The half of her mouth she had left was screaming, or trying to, although there was no real possibility for noise with her throat hanging open.

The smell of her was— the stink of curses, and pain, and suffering, and, oh god, she was still alive, she was, she was, she was _looking_ at him.

His head was ringing, a strange, empty noise. Everything was weirdly clear, in slow motion.

Caroline was speaking, to the cameras.

“ _This_ is the work of the witches council. They will try to deny it but any one of you can verify it, with access to a ship and a crowbar. This is a child, kidnapped from her parents for no greater sin than daring to question the council, turned against her will and tormented eternally—”

There was more, there was a whole speech, about injustice and freedom and whatever, Adebayo didn’t hear it, didn’t hear any of it, he was too busy throwing up, until his stomach was empty, until it was just bile and bile and nothing, and the child was staring at him, and the cameras were rolling, rolling, rolling…

 

 

 

 

She gestured for the cameras to stop recording. The broadcast equipment would loop for as long as they had access to the channels— Liang raised three fingers, which meant seventy percent of the connections were already down. She’d tried to frontload as much of the key points as possible, since she’d known each additional second had an exponentially decreasing likelihood of getting blocked. But it had been worth it to do the full speech, because some people would find their way to the full version, people always found a way.

She wanted to continue, wanted to describe the night 500 years ago, when the witches had rejected the compromise and attacked, but her audience wasn’t old enough to remember, and her point had been made.

She felt tired, drained and old.

They’d caught the witch on camera from a thousand angles, then led him, ashen-faced, back to his rooms.

As for the child— they’d done the best they could to detangle the curses, and eventually she’d given a little gasp in their arms, and died. Somewhere out there a relay point was missing half a vampire, too small a difference to make an impact at this point, really.

It didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, there was a war to fight, Carolien told herself, and tried to believe it, but she could see the child’s eye staring at her, all the children, all of them—

 

The shattered glass of the tank lay scattered across the floor, and when Adebayo stepped down, hard, a piece of it had stuck to the sole of his shoe. He’d told his guard he’d needed to use the bathroom, and although they’d left the door open a crack he was able to shield himself mostly from view and get the shard of glass, as long as his pinky finger, into his hand.

 

He hated himself. He hated the vampires more, for making this happen, for forcing this confrontation. His life had been comfortable and he had been happy, until that evil creature had overpowered his mind and kidnapped him.

Diola had said to be brave, Diola had said to be alert. Well, Adebayo knew the vampires were planning something big, something far bigger than he’d initially imagined. He knew this because the girl’s fate demanded nothing less.

He was a coward but there was one thing left he could still do, was still good for.

He took the glass shard, carefully, in his shaking hands, and then slashed it through the tattoo that ran down his chest, curling from neck to navel.

Even as the world went black he felt, rather than heard, the explosion. He tried to feel comforted by it, but all he felt was deep, poisonous regret.

 

The witch’s curse tore through four of the underwater ships, flooding them with water and killing everyone instantly.

It could have been worse, because it turned out he wasn’t actually dead. They hooked him up on respirators and kept his heart going, even though Klaus was snarling, wanting to kill him with his bare hands.

“We can’t risk further damage,” Caroline pleaded.

“This is your fault,” he snapped, and she started to cry. “Ah, don’t—” he said, helplessly, and held her, gathering her into his arms, stroking her hair.

“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.

At least it hadn’t been a wasted venture. There was no way to know how many people had viewed the video by way of their brief broadcast on the official channels, but the underNet copy had been downloaded two billion times and counting. Ifrah’s short clip, of Adebayo vomiting, was also making the rounds. People were using it as a reaction image to news broadcasts, and it kept being taken down, and they kept finding ways around the censors to get it up again.

Lieutenants from hundreds of galaxies had blipped in reports of recruits, and while it was likely many of them were witch spies and they would need to be weeded through carefully, it was clear an important tipping point had been reached.

Now if they could just manage to survive long enough to reap the benefits…

The witches were coming. This everyone knew, and they knew what it meant.

They were putting a force together to wait by the wormhole, the suicide squad holding back the first wave. Volunteers. Vasatel, whose entire family had been murdered back in Therop, was taking command, with Lena seconding. Caroline hadn't talked them out of it even though she'd come to rely on them so much and wasn't prepared to say goodbye.

She'd been immortal for thousands of years now, she'd already figured out that she was _never_ prepared to say goodbye.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> getting too close to posting deadline for comfort, so this chapter is the second of a double update. only the epilogue left.

When the witches landed they were a greatly reduced force, blasted as soon as they exited the wormhole, shot at during their landing, struck out of the air by writhing tentacles.

But they landed anyway, casting spells and shields, bouncing back lasers, blasting apart squids. They started teleporting into the underwater galleons, and there curses mixed with bursts of gunfire.

The ships had been rigged with as many booby traps as the rebellion forces could put together, so the witches made slow, cautious progress, but they were undeniably progressing.

Diola felt a grim satisfaction with every rebel she cut down, but she was focused on one thing only, underneath the rage, because she'd felt, as soon as she'd set foot on the planet, the pulse in her family charms that said her brother was, somehow, still alive.

 

It was obvious the rebels were going to lose, Adebayo didn't understand why they hadn't simply surrendered and been done with it, until he realized that surrender hadn't been offered, that each side knew this was a battle to the death.

He still had no magic and he felt weak, weaker than he ever had. Everyone was ignoring him.

Like a trapped dying animal, he thought, all they cared about was taking down as many as they could with them. But it didn't make sense, not with what he'd overheard, how they'd talked about the wormhole suicide mission as just that, suicide, but not this, this ridiculous last stand on this watery planet.

And why were they so calm? There was a tension, almost like anticipation—

And then he felt the tug, in his chest. His sister. His sister was _here_.

He staggered out of his bed and into the hallway. Around him everything was a busy, frenzied network of activity. No one seemed to notice him as he limped, leaning heavily against the wall for support, in the wrong direction.

 

 

There was a ring of witch ships surrounding the planet, no longer blasting indiscriminately at the surface now that combat forces had landed but very much still guarding the skies.

Caroline was engaged in hand-to-hand combat which, ugh, but even as she was ripping heads of shoulders she was on the commline constantly trying to coordinate everyone to at least _pretend_ to follow the plan, okay, it was a good plan, even if these sorts of things tended to dissolve into chaos.

So she got to hear the cheer, echoed through multiple comms at once.

The daisychain explosion had worked. Flaming bits of debris fell towards the planet, the larger ones hissing into the ocean a few minutes later. But before the first piece of blasted apart ship hit the surface, there was a moment of just noise, the sound of cheers, the sound of the witches' stunned silence.

Caroline knew that this was it, the moment when they realized this wasn't simply going to be a rout. In the room where she was fighting the witches were obvious not only by their uniforms in red and black, but by the way they all seemed to sag for a moment, skin going grey, a chain-effect of horror and shock as they each seemed to separately absorb what had happened, glancing at each other for confirmation or denial.

The first bit of debris impacted with a hiss and shockwave and suddenly the room was all action again, but now it was the witches, fighting for their lives, desperate and furiously angry.

"Time to go," Caroline said, over the comms. "GO, GO, GO."

There weren't enough flight-worthy ships to get everyone off the planet, but they were going to do their best, dammit.

A witch came snarling at her and she banged his head against the wall, felt her arm go numb from the curse rebound.

Witches were going to start triggering death curses any second now, she thought frantically, there was no time, they needed to go.

 

 

 _Now_ the rebels were panicking, no longer weirdly calm, no longer anticipating, simply running. He felt the first bloodline curse reverberate through the walls of the entire ship, so that it groaned ominously and seemed to drop beneath his feet, and understood that something, something must have changed, something had made the rebels cheer and the witches were suddenly fighting for real, bloodline limits and all.

And the rebels were no longer going about with the cocky camraderie of a doomed last stand. They weren't running towards the witches, they were running—

Towards a spaceport, he realized, in a sudden flash. There was another spaceport. A secret one. There must be.

  _How_? How could that possibly be? Yamnaim was a planet under careful scrutiny, how had it been hidden under their noses—

So many things hidden under their noses—

His sister was here, he needed to find her, warn her.

But instead he found the two of them from the ship, Yasmin and Khaleed. He was— staggering, supported against her side, and Adebayo saw that his leg was— from the knee below his leg was simply missing, and he was bleeding, heavily.

When she saw him, her face darkened. She shifted a bit, her stance coming forward, as if to shield her brother.

His sister—

He looked away, deliberately.

She glared at him for a moment, and then they continued haltingly making their way away from him, towards the — towards what was probably an escape.

God, he felt tired.

He leaned against the wall, just to rest, just a minute.

That was how Diola found him, however long later, somewhere between a minute and eternity.

"Adebayo!" she said, rushing towards him. She was crying, and she stank of power and magic and death. She must have killed dozens of people already, he could tell.

He hugged her and for the first time since he'd been kidnapped he allowed himself to weep, going limp in her arms with relief.

"Only you," she said, "could somehow activate a bloodline limit and survive".

He didn't feel ready to explain, how it tied together, intent to kill and die and the method for it available but not quite—

In the background, he heard the sound of takeoff. The rebel ships were launching.

"They're getting away," Diola said, in his ear. "But don't worry, we _will_ track them down."

He was too tired. Later today, tomorrow, or someday, he'd need to look her in the eye and pretend he didn't know, hadn't seen the broken girl.

For right now, he simply allowed himself to be embraced.

They made their way through the chaos, Diola supporting him, and he felt a great love swell in him, for his family, for her, that she had come all this way to save him—

 

 

“We’ll find a way to handle this,” she said to him. “Eventually the videos will stop circulating— we can arrange a celebrity scandal, it’ll be old news before you know it, and they won’t win the next time, we’ll be prepared, they haven’t got half the troops we do. You don’t need to worry, Adebayo.”

And then, abruptly, he couldn’t anymore.

He let his arm fall from her shoulder, staggered to the wall.

“I can’t do this,” he said to her.

He looked into her eyes and saw she understood.

There was only so much you could run away and lie, he thought. There was only so long you could defer responsibility.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re making a mistake,” she said, at last, heavily. “And it won’t— it won’t change my—”

“I know,” he said. He was crying, but he didn’t let himself reach out and hug her, simply leaned against the wall and began walking, slowly, to where the vampires were.

 

_Adebayo_


	6. Epilogue

_Many, many years later_

"I remember," Klaus says, as their ship begins the four-month process of slowing down to a mere tenth of lightspeed, "that day you came to me and told me we needed to be thinking further."

He had Caroline's feet in his lap and was rubbing small circles into the pads of her toes.

"I don't think it was a mistake," Caroline said.

"Neither do I," Klaus said, "Not even after all this. You were right. I'm glad you pushed for us to make developing space travel a priority."

He paused.

"I mean." He said. "At the time, I thought you were completely crazy, of course. But— I'd been alive thousands of years, and you were right, that we— my family—" a sharp intake of breath at that word, as always— "we were stuck in our ways, had never really considered the implications of everything that changed in the centuries we were alive. We had grown small-minded. Or— or, really, we'd stayed the same, but everything else had grown, around us—"

Inside the spaceship all was quiet, except for the whirring of the light machines. These were a new model, and not a single vampire had been enslaved during their development. The artificial blood, which still tasted mostly like stale feces, gurgled in its generator tanks. Somewhere, a piece of loose charm-work hissed for attention. They'd attend to it soon enough.

Outside, the infinity nebula grew on the horizon, starling pinks and blues fading into green swirls and brilliant spots of white. From a distance it looked like an ocean.

The Mileva Maric could not actually enter the nebula, but it had the latest, most advanced shielding installed along its needle-thin shape, so that it could twirl lazily closer to the nebula than had ever previously been achieved. It was carrying several hundred tons of scientific measuring and imaging equipment, as well as sixteen probes destined for suicide missions into the cloud. There were at least two hundred untested physics theorems depending on this mission for confirmation— a deeply conservative estimate.

Caroline was wearing her lapis lazuli as a ring again, set in some ornate steel-and-platinum setting Klaus had insisted on designing himself. She knew she had a tendency to smile goofily when she looked at it, even when she tried her hardest to refrain in Klaus's presence.

Klaus's ring was much simpler, a simple polished band with no stones. On the inside of the band Caroline had engraved a sentence, as ridiculously and pointlessly romantic as everything else about them, really.

"Eternity is a long time," Caroline said at last, settling her head against Klaus's shoulder. "You realize I will definitely get sick of you at some point, right?"

"I'll find a way to win you back," he said, complacently, and watched through the spelled-glass sides as stars were born and formed on a great vast shining sea.


End file.
